Do perceived use contexts influence usage behavior? An instrument development of perceived use context

In this study, we advance current knowledge on IS usage behavior by introducing the concepts of time, location, social, and technological use in perceived use context. We develop an instrument to verify the effects of use context on intention-to-use game services. We find that contextual factors of perceived use context (i.e., perceived time use, perceived location use, perceived social use, and perceived technological use) influence users’ behavioral beliefs (i.e., perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use), which leads to their subsequent attitude and behavioral intention toward using game services. Grounded in our findings, key implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

现代软件开发中的use case技术

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现代软件开发方法中的use case技术

1 引言在面向对象的软件开发方法中.客户关心的是软件系统的功能,而开发人员的工作是围绕目标软件系统中的对象来进行的。为了把软件系统的对象模型和功能模型有机地结合起来,在众多的面向对象开发方法中都采用了一种称为“use case”的技术。use case的分析、设计和实现与面向对象的分析、设计和实现结合起来,提供了一种贯穿整个软件生命周期的开发方式,使得软件开发的各个阶段的工作自然、一致地协调起来。在UML系统建模规范中,更把use case做为其中的一个重要组成部分。下面以UML中的相关模型为例,介绍use case技术。     

Teachers’ personal web use at work

This article presents findings from an online survey of teachers concerning personal web use (PWU) at work. Often considered as ‘cyberslacking’ or ‘Internet abuse’, PWU is a growing phenomenon within increasingly Internet-dependent workplaces. The findings of this study highlight a wide range of types of personal web usage amongst teachers ranging from sending personal emails to social networking and personal banking as well as a range of reasons for PWU from a means of addressing permeable work-life boundaries and coping with work intensification to providing a virtual space for routine resistance. The data also suggest that, rather than being detrimental to the organisation, PWU could potentially be a means of increasing worker productivity and developing the digital literacy of teachers. It concludes by considering the implications of the findings for senior managers within organisations.     

Does Internet use reflect your personality? Relationship between Eysenck’s personality dimensions and Internet use

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between three Eysenckian personality dimensions – psychoticism, extroversion and neuroticism – and the Internet use. A sample of 427 Turkish university students completed the Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire, an Internet survey which contained questions about interpersonal motives for Internet use and a scale for measuring the tendency for expressing one’s “true” self on the Internet. The results indicated that psychoticism was the only personality dimension related to establishing new relationships and having “Internet only” friends; and extroversion was the only personality dimension that is related to maintaining long-distance relationships, and supporting daily face-to-face relationships. The results supported the idea that for some individuals, Internet can be used as social substitute for face-to-face social interactions while for some others it can be used as a tool of social extension, depending on the user’s personality characteristics. Also, psychoticism and neuroticism were found to be positively associated with the expressing “true self” on the Internet, and it was shown that the relationship between psychoticism and Internet uses as social substitute is mediated by the tendency to express one’s true self on the Internet.     

Parent–adolescent communication,parental Internet use and Internet-specific norms and pathological Internet use among Chinese adolescents

Data were collected from 3556 Chinese junior and senior high school students to explore the associations between adolescent pathological Internet use (PIU) and parental variables, including parent–adolescent communication, parental Internet use and parental Internet-specific norms regarding adolescent Internet use. In particular, this study considered the different role of parental variables under two conditions: parental norms that were consistent or inconsistent with parents’ Internet use behaviors. The participants were asked to answer an anonymous questionnaire that included all mentioned factors. The results revealed an 11% rate of adolescent PIU, and hierarchical multiple regressions indicated that parent–adolescent communication predicted PIU negatively under both conditions. When parental norms were consistent with their Internet use behaviors, parental norms predicted adolescent PIU negatively; conversely, when parental norms were inconsistent with their Internet use behaviors, parental behaviors predicted adolescent PIU positively. Implications for family-based prevention and the limitations of this study are discussed.     

How and why do student teachers use ICT?

This paper examines how and why student teachers made use of information and communication technology (ICT) during a 1‐year initial teacher education programme from 2008 to 2009. This is a mixed methods study involving a survey (N = 340) of the entire cohort and a series of semi‐structured interviews with a sample of student teachers within the cohort (N = 21). The study explored several themes, including the nature of student teachers' use of ICT; variation in the use of ICT; support for, and constraints on, using ICT; attitudes to ICT and to teaching and learning more generally. It was found that nearly all teachers were receptive to using ICT – more so than their in‐service counterparts – and made frequent use of it during their placement (internship) experience. The Interactive Whiteboard (IWB) was central to nearly all student teachers' use of ICT, in good part, because it was already used by their mentors and was widely accessible. Student teachers' use of ICT was categorized in three levels. Routine users focused mostly on the use of the IWB for whole class teaching; extended users gave greater opportunities for pupils to use ICT for themselves; innovative student teachers used ICT in a greater range of contexts and made more effort to overcome barriers such as access. ICT use was seen as emerging from a mix of factors: chiefly student teachers' access to ICT; their feeling of ‘self‐efficacy’ when using ICT; and their belief that ICT had a positive impact on learning – in particular, the impact on pupils' behavioural and affective engagement. Factors which influenced ICT use included mentoring, training and support. Limitations on student teachers' use of ICT are explored and it is suggested that new teachers need to be supported in developing a more discerning use as they begin their teaching careers.     

DVB-IPTV content download services—overview and use cases

IPTV services have been widely deployed by network operators around the world over the last years. However, real-time streaming of Linear TV and Video-on-Demand (VoD) offerings, especially in High Definition quality, still puts a high burden on the network and content servers concerning bandwidth, Quality-of-Service, processing performance and scalability if 100.000s of users have to be supported simultaneously. While multicast delivery can cope with some of these problems for Linear TV services, the unicast VoD services cannot take advantage of that and especially the request for on-demand content is expected to substantially grow in the future. With the introduction of Content Download Services (CDSs), operators have the option to provide IPTV services in innovative ways: They can provide high-quality video services to users with limited access bandwidth, offload the streaming request for blockbuster movies at peak times from the VoD servers or provided personalized advertisements for insertion into a live program event in advance to the users end device. The Digital Video Broadcast (DVB) Project has recently finalized its CDS specification within its IPTV specification efforts. DVB CDS supports push and pull delivery models with unicast, multicast and peer-to-peer distribution in order to enable various business models and use cases. In this work we introduce the specified technology and map it to example use cases and business models.     

Land use qualities identified in remotely‐sensed images

Land use can be defined as the intentional use of a specific piece of land resulting in patterns of ecological responses that are visible in land cover and landscape. The responses to land use often result in a heterogeneous combination of classes of land cover. Existing methods used in the classification of satellite imagery are limited in their capacity to handle categories consisting of heterogeneous or multiple land cover classes. Accordingly, a spatial relational post‐classification (SRPC) method has been developed which uses a spatial relational post‐classification of land cover classes based on the incorporation of information about identified land use qualities. This paper explains how this method works, and presents the results from a case study of the surroundings of Sötåsa village located in southern Sweden. Different land cover classes were aggregated semantically into two land use quality classes. In conclusion, it is argued that it is possible to make the semantic shift from reflectance to land use qualities using the developed method on satellite data, and that this provides considerable scope for the future analysis of land use.     

VDT eyeglasses—multifocal lenses for near distance use

This paper discussed eyeglasses for middle-aged video display terminal (VDT) users and how middle-aged VDT users can obtain the proper eyeglasses for task that they perform in their office. First, the loss of visual function of middle-aged workers and the characteristics of modern eyeglass lenses are described in terms of VDT use. Then, a method for selecting the proper VDT glasses from an eyeglass shop was described. The discussion is particularly important in countries like Japan, where most workers do not have at their disposal experts to assist in the selection of the proper eyewear for their work-related tasks.     

Is the social use of media for seeking connectedness or for avoiding social isolation? Mechanisms underlying media use and subjective well-being

This study provides a resolution for two contrasting hypotheses around media use, the augmentation and the displacement hypotheses. To do this, we conducted an online survey of 300 Korean adults examining the relationships among the social use of media, face-to-face communication, social isolation, connectedness, and subjective well-being. The results indicate that connectedness, not avoiding social isolation, mediates the effects of the social use of media on subjective well-being. On the other hand, both connectedness and avoiding social isolation mediate the effects of face-to-face communication on subjective well-being. These results suggest that the social use of media is limited to seeking connectedness to others, whereas face-to-face communication can facilitate avoiding social isolation as well as seeking connectedness, which can explain why the two contrasting hypothesis, the augmentation and the displacement hypotheses, can be right. In the domain of seeking connectedness, media can augment face-to-face communication. On the other hand, in the domain of avoiding social isolation, media may displace face-to-face communication.     

Are use case and class diagrams complementary in requirements analysis? An experimental study on use case and class diagrams in UML

Despite the status of united modeling language (UML) as the de facto standard for object oriented modeling, it has received controversial reviews. The most controversial diagram in UML is the use case diagram. Some practitioners claim that use case diagrams are not valuable in requirements analysis and some have even argued that use case diagrams should not be part of UML. This research examined the values of use case diagram in interpreting requirements when use case diagrams are used in conjunction with class diagrams. In other words, the study investigated the possible synergetic values and relationships between the use case and class diagrams in the context of requirements analysis. This study used theories from cognitive psychology as its theoretical and conceptual foundation. The data collection utilized the verbal protocol technique in which subjects were asked to think aloud as they interpreted the use case and class diagrams. The results show that the use case diagrams were more completely interpreted than the class diagrams. The presence or absence of one diagram when interpreting another diagram had no effect on the outcome of the interpretation. From the results, we argue that the use case diagrams and class diagrams depict different aspects of the problem domain, they have very little overlap in the information captured, and both are necessary in requirements analysis.     

Ontology-based automated support for goal–use case model analysis

Combining goal-oriented and use case modeling has been proven to be an effective method in requirements elicitation and elaboration. To ensure the quality of such modeled artifacts, a detailed model analysis needs to be performed. However, current requirements engineering approaches generally lack reliable support for automated analysis of consistency, correctness and completeness (3Cs problems) between and within goal models and use case models. In this paper, we present a goal–use case integration framework with tool support to automatically identify such 3Cs problems. Our new framework relies on the use of ontologies of domain knowledge and semantics and our goal–use case integration meta-model. Moreover, functional grammar is employed to enable the semiautomated transformation of natural language specifications into Manchester OWL Syntax for automated reasoning. The evaluation of our tool support shows that for representative example requirements, our approach achieves over 85 % soundness and completeness rates and detects more problems than the benchmark applications.     

Online social networks: Why do students use facebook?

The growth and popularity of online social networks has created a new world of collaboration and communication. More than a billion individuals around the world are connected and networked together to create, collaborate, and contribute their knowledge and wisdom. Despite the importance of online social networks, there is relatively little theory-driven empirical research available to address this new type of communication and interaction phenomena. In this paper, we explored the factors that drive students to use online social networks (e.g., Facebook). Specifically, we conceptualized the use of online social networks as intentional social action and we examined the relative impact of social influence, social presence, and the five key values from the uses and gratification paradigm on We-Intention to use online social networks. An empirical study of Facebook users (n = 182) revealed that We-Intention to use online social networks is strongly determined by social presence. Among the five values, social related factors had the most significant impact on the intention to use. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Should one always use repeated squaring for modular exponentiation?

Modular exponentiation is a frequent task, in particular for many cryptographic applications. To accelerate modular exponentiation for very large integers one may use repeated squaring, which is based on representing the exponent in the standard binary numeration system. We show here that for certain applications, replacing the standard system by one based on Fibonacci numbers may yield a new line of time/space tradeoffs.     

How does e-mail use affect perceived control of time?

It is well established in the psychology literature that personality predicts performance to some degree. However, personality neither solely nor directly predicts outcomes. Rather, performance and outcomes unfold through context-specific mediating constructs. This study identified two constructs that mediate the relationship between proactivity and perceived control of time in e-mail use and tested the model with data from 251 knowledge workers. The results show that proactivity predicts the perceived control of time in e-mail use through both e-mail-specific time management behavior and e-mail self-efficacy. Further, greater e-mail self-efficacy leads to improved e-mail-specific time management behavior.